The Final Week of Culture 101

I’ve been really bad about posting what I’ve been doing this week but nothing really of substance has happened. I’ve continued to eat great meals and recently most of those have been made by me and my roommates. Our Survival Italian class comes to a close today and I’m not sure if I’m going to be sad the daily field trips will be ending. Some of them were really cool like a cooking class but a visit to the suburbs felt like a waste of time. What they call suburbs just looks like the poor outskirts of the city. I was expecting to be taken to big tuscan homes in neighborhoods with vineyards all around and that was obviously not the case. I didn’t even take pictures from that little outing.

One of my favorite activities was the cooking class. Marco, one of the professors at LDM, first took us around the bottom floor of the Mercato Centrale. He showed us where to buy the best quality fish, meat, cheese, bread, vegetables, and fruit. Supposedly students at LDM get a discount at those places but nothing seemed to happen when we went back and attempted to get the discount. It might have been due to the language barrier. The men that work in the different booths seem super sweet but know very minimal English. After getting the 411 on where and what to buy, we went upstairs to LDM’s kitchen. It is enclosed in glass walls so everyone walking around the market can see exactly what you are doing. Marco stressed that we had to be super clean and that meant we couldn’t lick our fingers when making the chocolate soufflé. I was expecting to get to cook the entire thing but it turned out that we had to watch Marco do most of it and just assemble it ourselves. That was a little disappointing. The food turned out delicious. It was probably a good thing he made most of it. For a decoration on the crepes, he had baked tomatoes in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Little did I know that if you stabbed your fork into it, the juice would explode all over you because of the pressure that built up in the oven. This cooking class made me even more excited to start my Food & Wine Pairing course this week.

spinach and ricotta filled crepe with tomatoes, basil, and a butter cream sauce

chocolate soufflé with vanilla gelato

Our final field trip was to a town just outside of Florence. It was up on a huge hill that overlooked the entire city. The view was still gorgeous but it was really cold, windy, and rainy yesterday so it wasn’t that enjoyable. It even started to spit snow for awhile and we’ve been told that snow is rare in Florence. Costansa, one of our Italian language teachers, told us that we all needed to come back because the view is a thousand times better on a sunny clear day.

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One thought on “The Final Week of Culture 101”

I really am enjoying your writings, do keep it up. I will keep them forever and I do let people read them too. (Like family). I tell Bil about what you are doing. Is it what you expected?? I know you like learning more about their foods and how to prepare it. Keep up the good work. Love you and proud of you.